Faculty Spotlight: Shingo Satsutani

His educational path was clear: Shingo Satsutani was going to be an engineer.

He completed his studies, knowing he could get a well-paying job. But Satsutani was
drawn to Western philosophy, an interest that would take him in a direction he never
imagined.

Now the Japan native has made a home for himself at College of DuPage, teaching Japanese
to eager students and introducing a wide range of students to the beauty, history
and culture of his country.

"I knew I'd become a teacher because of the good teachers I encountered during elementary
school, high school and college. Although early on, I didn't know I wanted to be a
teacher," Satsutani said, with a laugh.

While his friends from school went on to work for multimillion-dollar companies, Satsutani
got involved in social student activism, including the anti-Apartheid movement. The
experience not only allowed him to grow as an individual, but also helped him build
a strong sense of right.

"I said, 'Well I can't just go to work for multinational companies who are abusing
people.' That was it," he said. That's when I went to philosophy."

Satsutani's approach to teaching Japanese is relaxed. While some may have more difficulty
than others in grasping the language, he compares language skills with musical talent.

Regardless of any inherent skills, Satsutani's students are encouraged to enjoy the
moment, taking in as much information as they can to create a more global view of
the world. It's a large part of the reason Satsutani leads classes to Japan through
COD's Field Studies program.

"Japan is small, you know," he said. "Imagine half the U.S. population living in 30
percent of California."

But with the constantly evolving communications world, the globe seems to be getting
smaller. People can speak to each other from other sides of the world in real time
and companies now spread across several continents. Educating people in other cultures,
therefore, is becoming more and more important, Satsutani said.

This was evident when a massive earthquake and tsunami struck his homeland in 2011.
Less than 72 hours after the catastrophe, Satsutani wrote in his blog that Japan and
its people will rise again. Such hope in the face of hardship is common in this culture,
and it's tested time and time again.

"In some respects, Japan is a good friend to natural disasters," said Satsutani, explaining
that the mountainous island nation is situated on fault lines, home to an active volcano,
and vulnerable to major typhoons. People there have learned to be cautious – and accepting
of things in life far beyond their control.

"We do have a national characteristic, we call it resignation to the life. That means
don't go against the flow of the water. You just flow in and you float," he said.
"Something happened, OK, you accept what happened, and just don't go against that.
You start from there and little by little things get better."

In the days and weeks that followed the March 11 disaster, the world saw another national
characteristic at work as Japanese people maintained an amazing sense of decorum.
The darker side of human nature so prevalent in other recent catastrophes, like Hurricane
Katrina and the Haiti earthquake, seemed absent in Japan. Satsutani said bad things
like looting happened in Japan too, but on a much smaller scale.

"Here in the U.S., no matter how people are looking at you, you're not really worried
about it. I do what I have to do, and I'm right. But over in Japan one thing that
is important is how you are looked at, how you are watched by the people. From that
context, if you do behave wrong, from the standard, then you're standing out and the
people look at you as negative. Even though in that bad situation of a natural disaster,
that comes first in your mind, and you don't want to look bad," said Satsutani, who
began teaching at COD in 1994, a year before another major earthquake struck the western
side of Japan, where his mother still lives, taking 6,000 lives in its wake.

Today, he says, it's beautiful there again, a road to recovery more than 15 years
in the making. Communities in western Japan have welcomed evacuees from the eastern
part of the island, helping them to heal and rebuild their lives.

Satsutani enjoys introducing students to a new language and a new way of life. It
also gives them an opportunity to learn a language more complicated than the Latin
languages taught in most American high schools, he said.

"Japanese is not out of the Latin languages, so you have to maneuver three different
writing systems," Satsutani explained. "Japanese has 100 characters, plus some imported
from Chinese, but it's easier to learn Japanese if students have studied Spanish or
German because of the phonetics."

The country's history also plays a role, not only in Satsutani's language classes
but in his study abroad courses as well. Most students go into the trip with a pre-conceived
notion of the experience, but those assumptions fall far short of reality, he said.

"Students really learn there's history there,' he said of Japan. "When I say old,
they think a couple hundred years, because America is so young. But I mean old!"

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